WORKS
When I step outside my door I often get surprised by the colours in the Antwerp sky. It’s usually the nearby presence of water that makes for a peculiar sky. We have the river Scheldt floating at the left side of the city, but my home is situated on the other side of Antwerp, so I guess the river’s too far away to be the cause of these shades. I have my own theory: it must be the many fine dust particles coming from diesel cars and the harbour industry that cause the light fragmentation. (At least that way the pollution has one positive side effect!)
Inspired by the colourful sky as so many artists before me, I started my line-paintings. Some of them refer to specific places and times (not only Antwerp), others escaped from a memory, still others originated from the pigments in the paint themselves.
The first S-M-L-series (Wolfsmelk, 2019-2020) started as a research about size and the relationship between the size of the painting and the space it was exhibited in. I found it interesting that photographs could be enlarged when exhibited in a big space or kept small in smaller spaces. Photographs had this flexibility, a quality I wanted to explore in my paintings. But it’s much more difficult to do so as in paintings the production process is much slower. Which is one of the reasons why paintings are only made once, in one particular size. As a painter you have to think about the size in advance. Which size will be the best for this picture?
Avoiding this choice, I started a series of three paintings that depicted exactly the same, but in three sizes: small, medium and large.
My photo-paintings are started from analog photographs. To get to the final result (a photo print) many actions are taken. The analog pictures (negatives, positives or instant photographs) are scanned and digitally enhanced. Accidents that happen during the working proces are not always corrected. The image layout may get turned during automated scanning. Dust particles enter the image. Sometimes mistakes are even added to the image on purpose.
Some of the works have an added digital overpainting. The extra layer covers parts of the image, but at the same time it opens up the image, so it can reveal more.